Migrant Places

Migrant Place – making in Australia

The experience of migration has resulted in an intricate web of places, migrant places, which make up the cultural landscape of Australian cities and towns.  Cultural pluralism in Australian cities, however, is as deeply rooted in mainstream Australian culture as it is in ethnic enclaves.  Despite this, understanding the different layers of meaning for diverse cultural groups in the Australian public and private landscape is not easy.  The following research projects have focused on different aspects of this problem.

The Migrant  Guide to Heritage Places In Australia.

This is a Guide to assist migrants identify their heritage places in Australia.  Migrant heritage places are those places which tell the story of migration in Australia.  The history of migration is a valuable aspect of Australia’s heritage.  There are many places that are important to migrant groups that may not be known to the wider community.  This Guide shows how migrants, working in small groups, can identify the way the experience of migration imbues places in the host country with values, sometimes good and in other cases painful.  Over four meetings, the way a particular heritage of a cultural group has been brought to Australia can be examined and places associated with the migration experience can considered for listing on the Register of Australian Heritage Places.  Copies of the Guide can be obtained from Historic Environment Section, Australian Heritage Commission, GPO Box 787, Canberra, ACT  2601

Migrant Place-Making in Australia

This has been a focus of research since 1993.  Research has identified the qualities of the Australian urban cultural landscape that have been created by waves of different migrant groups.  The results are derived from two main investigations; interpreting how the experience of migration is manifest as place-making and determining whether cultural pluralism can be incorporated into concepts of Australian cultural heritage.  Phenomenological hermeneutics has been used to interpret the discourses of a number of migrant groups.  The study reveals how migrant groups both transport unmediated certain cultural practices and in other cases transform their culture as a result of settling in Australia.  The research is summarized as a typology of migrant places.  There are a number of publications of this work available.

The Migrant Garden.

There are many interesting migrant gardens in Australia.  The Vietnamese garden, The Greek, Italian and Lebanese gardens, the Croatian garden, the Portuguese garden, to name a few, are all intriguingly different.  It is clear that these gardens are rich in cultural meanings, both in the ways they are used and in the plants within them.  Migrant gardens are a gift to the culture of Australian cities.  Such modest common place expressions of ordinary people are part of the on-going historical process in which people, their plants and the way they are grown and used are in continual change.  Less clearly, there are unconscious expressions of migration in the garden, including ‘invented traditions’ from a revised past.  Living in a new country can be a releasing experience, particularly where rules and traditions have dominated the home country or where there are two ancestral countries.  The new country offers the opportunity for invented traditions often expressed in gardens. Despite this, most of these gardens will not last.  They are ephemeral cultural expressions and perhaps all we can do is catch their fleeting stories and attempt to understand the depth of their meaning.  This research is a collection of these stories.

Cultural Pluralism in Designed Space in Australian Cities.

Landscape design in Australia currently is represented by two main design approaches; the corporate ethic emerging predominantly from United States and some European models, and the perceived Australian landscape design ethic seen as abstract representations of the Australian landscape.  There are also new design approaches emerging from a group of designers who are migrants or children of migrants.  These designers are working in a cross-cultural way which has the potential to become an uniquely Australian design ethic for the 21st century.

This project seeks to contribute an understanding of the Australian design profession through interpretations of the design of the public realm.  The public realm is full of vibrant meanings attributable to the new immigrant groups whose presence in certain places can be clearly read in particular urban landscapes.  Cultural diversity as a result of migration, however, is not confined to so-called ‘ethnic’ centres.  The whole of Australian cultural life has been enriched by the complex interaction of immigrants from highly diverse backgrounds.  Many Australian designers, architects, landscape architects, urban designers, artists, film makers, and writers come from diverse backgrounds, some as first generation immigrants and others as children of immigrants.  Today multiculturalism in Australia’s public realm is as deeply rooted in mainstream places as it is in ethnic enclaves.  The large Australian cities are providing opportunities for the blending of design talents which is truly multicultural in a totally unselfconscious way.   This research is examining the design approach of a number of leading Australian designers from diverse backgrounds.